Posted
by
timothy
on Monday August 29, 2011 @07:50PM
from the we-call-this-the-photoshop-model dept.

itwbennett writes "Weak penalties and a lack of enforcement have made China a hotspot for software piracy, but it is possible to turn some pirated software into sales, says Vic DeMarines, vice president of products for V.i. Labs, a company that helps makers of engineering and design software track the unlicensed use of their products. Forty of V.i. Labs' clients use code to track when an installed application shows signs it's a pirated copy. The data collected makes a record of what organizations in China are using unlicensed copies across how many different PCs. They can then use the data to reach out to those organizations, who might not be aware they are using unlicensed software. 'We think that's a better way to reduce piracy overall,' says DeMarines. 'You need to target the organizations that should have the ability to pay license versus going after individual users or the people who crack the software.'"

If they are hard handed about it, the more the alternatives become attractive. A good example of this is the Ernie Ball BSA reaction. This publicity has had a ripple effect. It is the biggest reason I have gone open source at home.http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html [cnet.com]

I'm the guy who wrote the Ask Slashdot about the BSA about a month ago. This sounds very reminiscent of that. In my case I had no unlicensed software and the BSA gave up, but just being approached in this way really pissed me off. The BSA approached me because they thought I had money and assumed I was using unlicensed software - the were wrong on both counts but had they been right being cornered like that would in no way earn my favor for the software or companies they represent.

Re-read what you quoted. I have nothing against treating pirates as future customers - having someone with no money pirate your software and make money, then ask them to license the software is sort of a good idea (though it begs the question why they wouldn't offer a free version until then - I know Borland used to). But up and cornering them, threatening them, and bringing them to court is not only a dick move but it's also the worst possible way to foster customer loyalty.

Many of the victims of the BSA aren't people who maliciously copied software - they're people who paid for it, then lost the docket. Seriously, look up the requirements the BSA have for your software to be deemed "legitimate".

Change of tune much? Firstly you said that the BSA are the good guys because they only go after nasty, evil pirating companies. Now you say that they're the good guys because they only go after the nasty, evil not-conforming-to-EULA companies.

Sorry, no. BSA are an extortion racket, and EULAs are the tools they use to squeeze unearned money from their marks. They are in no way, shape or form "good guys".

exactly, we are in the middle of an audit.We have lots and lots of licences.... but no proof of purchase due to most machines being second handed (remarketing as ibm calls them)...The machines come with OEM licences which are non-transferables between machines but it seems they are also non-transferables between bussiness...Add to that that this is the only country where the dollar actually gets stronger and you can figure that 20k usd in licences is a bit steep for a pretty small shop...

That's a copyright issue. If the company ignored you you'd need to file a claim, but the thing is in China copyright claims are basically ignored unless it's a national-level PR issue. Sorry, that's just China.

If you paid good money for an "exclusive" license on some photos and then posted them to a public facing website you are incredibly retarded. My data is mine and your data is yours, but as soon as you give me a copy of your data, that copy becomes mine. You have no way to enforce what I do with it (well, you could take me to court if there are copyright or other violations but that is ugly and expensive) after you send it to my browser.

If you're profiting, you need to pay for the tools and software you use in your work

And keep every receipt (dated receipts - undated ones don't count) for every piece of software you possess, along with records on each individual computer linking that particular license to that particular receipt.

Once you've done that, you're ready to start getting ready for the BSA.

Now try doing that in a small business, especially an IT-related small business. Good fucking luck.

The BSA should be driven from the land, their offices razed, the ruins burned, the very earth salted; their children cursed, their souls damned, their ill-gotten gold melted and poured down their throats.

The BSA should be driven from the land, their offices razed, the ruins burned, the very earth salted; their children cursed, their souls damned, their ill-gotten gold melted and poured down their throats.

Or think that somehow the Chinese government would assist them in doing this. The Chinese government would probably point out to the trillion-dollar stack of US Treasury notes and say "paid in advance"...

I dunno. The other side of the coin is that if China doesn't start cracking down on IP violations, the businesses that send all that work over there are gonna start looking elsewhere. Hell, some of them already are.

If only the RIAA paid attention: treating pirates as potential customers: why not (upon finding them) send them marketing emails and specials? "We noticed you've been listening to a lot of Radiohead lately, their latest album just came out, act now for 30% off. Help support a great band, and be a part of their art". It wouldn't work for everyone, but it would soften the RIAA's image and potential bring in some new sales in one clever move.

Does the RIAA even care about their image? Most people don't go out choose whether to buy RIAA music or not. You buy a song that isn't indie, it's RIAA, right? They could run ads saying "RIAA: we hate the following ethnic groups..." and tell racist jokes, and unless a boycott of all non-indie was organized, I'm guessing they'd still profit just as much.

"upgrade" my taste in music? I'm not going to claim that Lavigne is a respectable artist, but musical tastes are just musical tastes. There's no hierarcy there. You listen to music you enjoy, trying to change the music you like is pretentious, fake, sand for insecure people.

'You need to target the organizations that should have the ability to pay license versus going after individual users or the people who crack the software.'"

This basically sums up how copyright law should be enacted. Make it commercial-only. There would still be plenty of incentive to create for artists, and regular people wouldn't need to have a deep understanding of the law to find out if they are legally entitled to sing happy birthday to their kid or not.

The big mistake is assuming that every artist deserve to become a millionaire.

I agree with you, but I still think that copyright is important for artists. Sure, musicians can do what they did before copyright - perform. But what of a fiction author? I suppose they could get paid for signings and whatnot, but I think having exclusive commercial rights to their work would be reasonable.

Stop talking as if copyright is the only way to compensate authors. Compensation, in order to encourage creation, is what's important, is what we want, not copyright per se. Performance may be impractical for authors, but that and copyright are hardly the only ways to compensate artists. There's patronage. There's ad revenue, endorsements, merchandising, commissions. And there are donations, prizes, awards.

We really need better alternative systems. We can certainly do up a new, improved patronage sy

I think every artistic endeavour that has become an 'industry' (music, books, etc.) has been filled by middlemen that takes the major share of the money and try (and succeed) to pass laws to ensure they keep getting money for a long time.

In other art domains, artists produce pieces of art (paintings, sculptures, etc.), and sell them to make money. If they want to keep getting money, they need to keep producing art.

Artist in non-industry domains don't seem to need the incentive to be able to profit from

In other art domains, artists produce pieces of art (paintings, sculptures, etc.), and sell them to make money.

I don't think this is true. I bet Walmart sells more "art" than the whole individual art community put together, even in dollar terms. That crap is all produced in Chinese assembly lines - I don't think the "artist" is getting the bulk of the compensation.

In other art domains, artists produce pieces of art (paintings, sculptures, etc.), and sell them to make money.

This is not true! Decent artists sell hundreds of prints of their paintings, even if someone bought the original. Even sculptors typically make multiple copies of their sculptures, in all different sizes. As a buyer, I don't even technically have the right

the trick is to make the reproduction into art. that's how prints of several artists are worth more than prints of others, and prints from certain batches are worth more than from others. if the copy is just laser printed, then it's just that.

that's how prints of several artists are worth more than prints of others, and prints from certain batches are worth more than from others.

Sometimes it's a quality difference, but more often it is just sentimentality. The first printing is almost often more valuable than any later series, and the lower-numbered prints fetch more - even though they all came off the machine at the same time and the order is just how the artist happened to hand-number them. This is exactly the same as comic book collecting:)

I'm not! But I don't think it is unreasonable to say, "For a limited period of time, you cannot profit monetarily from the artistic work of others without their permission." Heck, even you mention ad revenue and merchandising... that's exactly what I'm talking about. Copyright sucks as currently implemented, but I don't think it is worth abandoning completely.

That is actually quite unreasonable, as "profit monetarily" is too vague to define.

LOL, well I'm not a lawyer. There are people employed full time who are more capable of me in writing legalese. I want normal, non-business people to not worry about copyright law. You like a CD and copy it for a friend? Fine. Photocopy/email a cool news article to your mother? Fine. Sing Happy Birthday at your kid's party? Fine.

Sell the CD copy? Uh-oh. Trade it for some other goods or services? Uh-oh. Make that news article part of your own newspaper? Uh-oh.

The law however is not good with things which are not well known and cannot be controls. By its very nature, creating new content is not well known, as when you create new content, you're creating exactly that: something that is not well known before. You certainly cannot control it either, as innovation does not have a fixed schedule and can happen anywhere, anytime.

I'm willing to accept an imperfect solution. In any case, I don't think getting rid of copyright altogether is politically viable. I'd rather see an improvement than to tilt at windmills.

I think ultimately we will replace copyright. We will create better systems. They will be so much better that artists will abandon copyright. Creating better systems won't be that hard because copyright sets such a low bar. Copyright won't be repealed; societies are much too conservative to consider a move like that. It'll just fall into disuse. But for the present, we'll have to wait for a generational change or 2.

You kid, but seriously, this position is not as radical as you suggest. I want to see artists and scientists encouraged with monetary compensation, and I want the compensation based at least loosely on the value of their contributions. The market economy, when not warped by artificial monopoly protection (such as copyrights) or other government bungling, has been one of the best tools we have for determining a fair valuation, and I would like to keep a little of that if possible. Marxists would not care

Certainly abolishing copyright law isn't "radical" by historical standards - all you are doing is erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone. Not because they are keeping it a secret, but because they have the full force of law behind them!

But changing the way that people are paid to some kind of non-capitalist merit system is quite radical. You'd first have to devise a system of ranking merit, which I think you'll find very close to impossible to beat the

What I'm outlining is thoroughly capitalist. You create something of value. The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?

erasing a weird 200-or-so-year blip where ideas, songs, and knowledge can "belong" to someone

Exactly. The fundamental problem is that information is not material. Laborious to create, yes, and valuable, yes. But not material. Once created, it can be copied easily, at virtually no cost. And it will be copied. Data is not a scarce resource. It therefore makes little sense to try to apply prop

The value is measured in some kind of market. You get paid according to that measure. What could be more capitalist than that?

It's not capitalist because you are not letting the market determine what is valuable. You declare that something is valuable based on some measure (say, popularity) and then declare compensation based on that measure. In a capital market, any arbitrary thing can influence the perception of value.

The part where the corruption sneaks in is the defining of the measure and the method of measurement. So for music everyone might agree on "popularity", but there might be a very complicated system involving compan

That's why I think many different methods is the way to go. Don't agonize over which is best, try every one that looks good. Have a bunch of competing private companies all promoting and using their own different methods, both for choosing recipients and for raising revenue. An individual artist will do well with some, and not so well with others. I hope the competition would also keep the corruption down. There will be corruption, there always is. But something like the Nobel Prize is well regarded.

Taxes is just one of many ways. But that is so difficult to get and keep accepted politically. A levy, such as the one on blank CDs in several countries, including Canada, is similar. The difference is that the government never touches the money, which may make it slightly more acceptable to some. The collections all go to a private corporation. Could set up levies on music playing devices as well.

As for government agencies, one is the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservatives have been trying

The problem is there will always be self-entitled dickheads. Digital distribution? Pirates will copy it (and sure as hell won't donate some cash back to support the author if they like it). Ad revenue? People will remove the ads and republish it, or block the ads if on the internet. Patronage? Very few people will be willing to stump up thousands of dollars for something they may not even like. Merchandising? What's the point in signing a merchandising agreement if XingHao Zheng Trading Co. will kno

It isn't a popular sentiment but are the vast majority of books of any constructive use beyond keeping the publishing industry afloat?

None of the arts have a "constructive use":) But we are wired to be entertained by art. I have no problem keeping separate systems in place for industrial improvements (patents) and purely artistic works (copyright).

If it becomes as easy to reproduce a product as it is to copy a song, should the ability to make money selling something people want vanish?

Basically, yes. In this book [thelightsinthetunnel.com] the author analyses the trends for the future, with a rather pessimistic view. Automation in the next few decades will have a significant effect on economics.

Most of the time I read titles like this as "Turning Chinese into Westerners". Applying western values to a Chinese culture (especially business culture) and expecting it to stick is naive at best. Western companies need to adapt to Chinese way of doing things to operate in China.

Most of the time I read titles like this as "Turning Chinese into Westerners". Applying western values to a Chinese culture (especially business culture) and expecting it to stick is naive at best. Western companies need to adapt to Chinese way of doing things to operate in China.

And how exactly would they do that? It's impossible to compete with somebody giving out free copies of your software when you're footing the cost for development.

why worry about the person uninterested in paying anything? If you are going to worry on Microsoft's behalf, be thankful for the billions Microsoft has and will continue to get from the majority of companies who want paid support and a corporate neck to choke when things go wrong, rather than squeezing the last $80 from a starving student.

we're not talking of stealing, merely making copies of information. That's "copyright infringement", if you happen to live in a place that believes in it. Historically, the notion would be considered absurd until very recently in history.

400 years is very recent history? And actually that's just the first example of a legal statute explicitly spelling out the idea of copyright. Actually, the first exclusive licenses to works were given out in the late 1400s, which just happens to coincide with the time that movable type was becoming common. In other words, copyright has existed almost exactly as long as there have been methods to cheaply reproduce a work.

The United Kingdom can just pay £1,000,000,000 every year to the BSA on behalf of the Chinese people as reparations for the colonization, dealing drugs in China the Opium War, etc. And the BSA will distribute the cash equitably among impacted software development companies.

In fact UK ought to do it for every country it colonized and sodomized. US should do the same for every country it invaded or has a military presence in, and for every African-American for making them slaves and for every Mexican for stealing their lands.

Yeah, right. Then we get Arab countries to pay out to central Africans for slavery as well, and Hungarians will foot the bill for Atilla. And don't even get me started on Mongolia.

I don't understand why China should cause hardship to her citizens to comply with unfair and illegal policies of the West. Would US change its laws to comply with some Chinese customs or laws?

Why China has copyright laws similar to those of the West is a question to the Chinese. No-one exactly held the gun to their head when they signed the Berne convention

Hats off to your insight, but here on/. not many have the same mind share.

Bullshit. There's an endless supply of Citizens of the World who think someone else needs to pay for all the depravities they feel guilty about every time they drive down to Buffalo to dodge their taxes.

A lot of the time a pirate distributor will go and "sell" this software at deep discounts, pretending its the real deal.

Problem is that a few months later when the software company comes asking for money, the owners get pissed, because in their mind they've already paid. It looks like a shakedown when you've paid $100/license, and then are told, "Oh by the way, you owe us $5000/license."

> "It looks like a shakedown when you've paid $100/license, and then are told, "Oh by the way, you owe us $5000/license."
"Looks like a shakedown" and "Is a shakedown" are two different things, by the way. There is no "double dipping" (as your title suggests) when you didn't pay the right people in the first place.

No, no it is not. Legitimate DVDs/software released are almost impossible to find in China, just because bootleg DVDs are selling for around sixty cents. The various sellers reduced the cost of them greatly for the Chinese market, for less than $5 (often with a few ads in front), but they're only available in the Potemkin downtown stores made to impress foreigners (every major Chinese city has a Potemkin downtown to impress foreigners).

Recently, even bootleg DVD sales have been hurting, because sixty cents for a disk is too much. People prefer free downloads. When quality DVDs are available on the street corner in front of your house for sixty cents, displayed in attractive packaging, and people still don't want to pay that much, obviously there isn't a mentality of paying for software because you "like" the company. There's a mentality that it would be stupid to waste the money when you can get a free version that's just as good.

By the way, these sixty cent DVDs are either straightforward copies of the legitimate DVD but with added subtitles, or maybe they'll contain a complete season of a TV show on just a few disks. Quality is great, and even street sellers will accept returns with no questions asked if there is a problem with it not playing or the quality is unacceptable for whatever reason.

Talk bad about MS and vista, but a great case study in how little software is actually bought is Windows Vista, which after a huge marketing campaign sold 244 copies. [newlaunches.com] Sure Vista sucked, but it was good enough that everybody still installed it. Linux and Mac are basically unused in China. Every single computer is running Windows.

When quality DVDs are available on the street corner in front of your house for sixty cents, displayed in attractive packaging, and people still don't want to pay that much, obviously there isn't a mentality of paying for software because you "like" the company. There's a mentality that it would be stupid to waste the money when you can get a free version that's just as good.

By the way, these sixty cent DVDs are either straightforward copies of the legitimate DVD but with added subtitles, or maybe they'll contain a complete season of a TV show on just a few disks.

The main reason they are not selling is, that there is a superior product available (online download).

The ease of use of an online download is greater than storing and inserting a pirate DVD to a player, which again is greater than an official DVD with10 minutes of forced commercial before the remote controller can be used.

The sad thing here is, that the original product is worse than what the pirates are offering (both bootleg and online), and no matter how low the prices for the original product go, the s

Yeah, sure. And encoding standards for domestic DVDs and BDs aren't going down the shitter because most customers think that youtube-quality video (i.e. something that would look at home on a cheap laserdisc, but with worse audio) is acceptable.This is the thing that pisses me off about QuickSync: sure, it's fast. But it's fast at the expense of quality, and if you turn off all the quality enhancing bits of a decent software encoder (e.g. x.264) to get a similarly poor-looking encode, it's not all that much

I used to sell a software product for $11. Customers got lifetime free upgrades and lifetime free email support. Licensing terms were very relaxed and it was allowed to install the software on multiple computers and even to share it with family members. People still pirated it.

I absolutely agree for the american industry, for china though I would say it is more or less a lost cause, in china between the average household having so little, and a lack of any concern for any foreign companies at all in their culture (they've pretty much been surrounded by propoganda that other countries are evil), tacked on with the lack of any enforcement against piracy in their laws (in addition to being perfectly able to be sold in stores/streetcorners etc... even companies can get away with usin

The "data collecting" code isn't just collecting data from unlicensed users but licensed users as well. So in exchange for paying the license fee you get software that phone's home about how you use it. In other words your computer now works for them in addition to working for you.

Has anybody tried promoting the rumor that Falun Gong sympathizers are particularly fond of pirated software, and that a substantial portion of the Dalai Lama's publicity slush fund is paid for by bootleg software sales?

Plus, allowing the price of a commodity to equal its marginal cost of production is absolutely textbook decadent capitalist behavior...

I may know of a company has a strict policy of licenenced software, but one of their engineers may have used a 30day demo past 30days, and were sent a nastygram saying pay $30k as one of these 'report to home' features were in the software. Now had it been more reasonably priced, or been offered as a rental, they might have seen the use in buying a licence, but even hinting at guilt could open them up to litigation, thus they couldn't even start a negotiation to purchase the software because the risk of a

Company: We've rigged our software to phone home information so we can identify you as an individual and/or the company you work for... but don't worry, it's only to help them become "legitimate" customers.

The arguments in summary;

It's an invasion of privacy.Counter #1: "Then don't install it."a. Most people install the software they do because it does what they want it to, it has a familiar interface, and it is cost effective.

That's the first thing I thought when reading the story Ã" to track unlicensed copies they would have to be able to communicate with V.i. Labs' servers. Surely even in China most enterprise networks are behind firewalls (the voluntary ones), so only the most careless companies would be caught.

If the "phone home" stuff does a simple HTTP request, it's a bit hard to block, no? Also, you're overestimating the competency of IT staff - the "firewall" they install may just be a simple Linksys special-of-the-

Just have them print the money instead of the federal reserve, they already print fake money that is such a good forgery that it takes a mass spectrometer to determine if it is real or not so they can they can pay themselves off and we can save a bundle on printing costs, win-win!!!!!!!!

Then the lawsuits will fly. There was a time where every single Windows install failed WGA due to MS's servers being down for a few hours. If MS had decided to have machines shut down and encrypt data to lock users out, Congress would be having an inquiry and lawsuits would be flying.

Instead, the best antipiracy mechanism is to use CD keys and deny access to network based services (multiplayer games, online updates, backups to a core server). Trying to do Draconian tactics may just bring lawsuits, or at

Strongarm antipiracy measures are not new. In the early 1990s, I knew a software company that was planning to bundle an IDE card that would function as a dongle with their product. If the dongle thought the software was hacked, it would dump a large amount of voltage via a cascade to fry the machine.

By "Planning" do you mean "pissed off geeks were fantasizing about it" or did this somehow make it as far as legal before being shot down?

It actually got on a breadboard as a prototype. The reason it got knocked off the drawing board were not the legal eagles, but the cost of having the board mass produced.

I think company DRM fetishes should be an economic indicator. Software companies dropping DRM? The economy is decent. When Draconian copy protection comes commonplace, it shows things are on the skids.

If it's detected, make it so that you hold their computers and data hostage by forcibly locking them out and threatening to erase their data if the proper verifications don't occur.

Yeah, it's strongarm tactics, but if you're living outside the law, you can't exactly complain to the cops to help you out that someone's bullying you.

Terrible Plan:

You can, in fact, complain to the cops. With limited exceptions for self defense against imminent threats, most jurisdictions take a very, very dim view of vigilante justice. Even if you are 100% accurate, and never hit a false positive, do you think that the fact that you have legal grounds for a copyright infringement civil suit against somebody is going to save your ass from the slammer after you've committed a bunch of unauthorized-access and extortion related felonies? Don't bet on it.

I work with the producer of this software in a close enough capacity that I would know otherwise.

There is somebody right now doing expensive battle in court, currently headed toward a loss. The data is factored, and matched against the user-base, which is known, and under signed contract. Quite simply, a false positive is damn near impossible, because the data exists to know who is authorized and who isn't. Every single seat is known globally. Not hard to sort out the false positives, and if it's a marg